Ask is hoping to make inroads on the highly-competitive search engine market by appealing to growing concerns over privacy with the launch of AskEraser, a feature that will allow users to immediately delete search queries stored on its servers.

Enabling the AskEraser feature allows the user to delete IP address, user ID, search queries and associated cookie information. In contrast to Google – which stores data for 18 months before anonymising it – Ask’s users are able to request that their search records are not stored on its servers in any form for any period of time.

Ask certainly needed to find a product and a marketing angle that would enable it to stand out in a market dominated by Google. Internet measurement firm comScore places Ask well behind Google and Yahoo in its shares of US searches in October (4.7% compared to 58.5% and 22.9% respectively; even Microsoft had a bigger share at 9.7%).

Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Ask.com, said: “For people who worry about their privacy, AskEraser now gives them control of their search information.”

The question is, of course, how many people are that worried? Will preservation of privacy be a big enough draw to lure market share from the likes of Google?

Almost a month ago, I wrote on this blog about Facebook’s latest assault on its users’ privacy with the introduction of its Beacon system, which allowed advertisers to track users’ shopping activities online and then broadcast those activities to friends via a mini-news feeds. The idea was that users would, in effect, be endorsing brands to their friends.

Speaking about the new tracking tool at the time Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said: “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”

Unfortunately for Facebook, it would appear that many of its users simply don’t see it that way.

Initially, Facebook said that it would not offer users an opt-out from Beacon, but such has been the uproar from users that Zuckerberg has had to issue this grovelling apology: “We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them.”

Users will now be allowed to the switch Beacon off, although Facebook is yet to address growing calls for clarification as to whether the information is still being collected, even if it’s not now being broadcast.

From a PR perspective, I find it hard to believe that Zuckerberg & Co didn’t see this backlash coming; apart from anything else, Christmas is hardly the time to introduce a system that broadcasts exactly what (presents!) you’ve purchased to all your friends. Introducing the system in this season just draws attentions to its flaws, and is almost guaranteed to generate bad publicity. I think it’s more likely that Facebook has just decided that it would be worth the initial flak it would receive, figuring that there will be a sizeable number of users who are happy with Beacon or can’t be bothered / don’t know how to opt out.

I can’t help but wonder whether the underlying tactic here is simply to push the boundaries as far as possible then pull back just a little and only if there’s a lot of fuss. It still equates to a net territory gain. Or perhaps the hope is that, gradually, the repeated intrusions into privacy will become less of an issue, as users become desensitised.

After last week’s ‘data debacles’ the bad news stories regarding online security breaches just seem to keep coming. The Times today leads with the news that the financial details of tens of thousands of us are available on the internet. Credit card numbers and other details are being sold for less than £1 each; by way of a taster, The Times was able to download the banking details – account numbers, security codes and, incredibly, pin numbers - of 32 people for nothing.

The events of just the past couple of months make a sobering rollcall: the personal details of 25 million lost by HMRC; the national insurance numbers of another 18,000 people lost by the Department of Work and Pensions; 15,000 Standard Life customers’ personal details lost in the post (HMRC again); 2000 people's details on a stolen laptop (HMRC again). ID cards, anyone?! Personally, I wouldn’t trust this lot with a coffeehouse loyalty card.

And it’s not just the Government.  It’s only six months ago that most of the UK’s banks were issued with a warning from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after being found to have dumped customers’ personal details – including account numbers - in outdoor bins.

Locally, the BBC uncovered details last week of breaches of security at hospitals in Bristol and Bath, with unauthorised searches being carried out on computerised patients’ records, as NHS staff browsed through the details of their friends and families.

It’s the lack of care in all this that I find most surprising. It beggars belief that the Government could disregard data protection procedures and safeguards and send disks containing our personal data by such an insecure method. Banks depend for their business on our trust in them, yet casually dump our account details in bins that anyone could root through. And I think many of us would be horrified to know that any of our friends or casual acquaintances working for the NHS could amuse themselves by searching through our medical records during their lunch hours if they wished.

But on a personal level, many of us are guilty of being equally careless of our identity. We have wireless networks in our homes that we don’t bother to secure. We don’t bother to update anti-virus and anti-spyware software on our computers. We dump our bank statements and other discarded post in our outside bins without bothering to shred it first. And, increasingly, we’re happy to post all manner of personal information about ourselves on the internet.

The ICO has warned people against posting too much information on social networking sites; it seems that young people in particular are just not bothered about having vast amounts of their personal information available online: 60% post their birth dates, 25% give details about their job, and 10% even post up their home addresses on the sites! All this, yet 71% of them say that they would not like colleagues or employers to search those sites before they had tidied them up a little! But employers are regularly searching sites like Facebook and MySpace – why wouldn’t they? What a valuable resource.

I’ve observed before on this blog that people seem increasingly less troubled by invasions of their privacy; perhaps the events of the last few months will make them think a little harder.